*Ma’Rebecca

Chuma Nwokolo

Her given name is Idia, although everyone calls her Ma’Rebecca now, after her daughter. I passed her low fence on my way to farm. Ever since the fire in her kitchen, she has been cooking on a brazier in her backyard. Rebecca was there as well, hanging up washings on a line. I waved, but they didn’t see me. Despite my shouted greetings, they didn't see me. And I can’t blame them. I know that type of embarrassment very well: that invisible wall you can wear everywhere you go - so that people can gape and gossip about you all day and you won’t even see them.

Ikerre-Oti village is not a good place to make mistakes. Idia’s own is more than twenty years old, but ten-year-old Ikerre children know it better than their catechism. She’s a widow, twice over. Her first marriage was three years old when her husband choked on a fishbone at a cousin’s I-Survived-Cancer party. Poor woman. I remember how that party ended as if it were yesterday. These very hands joined in the tug-of-war that pulled her from the mortuary.

Idia was only thirty-one in those days, and people really pitied her. No gossip could stick to her. And it wasn’t as if Ikerre’s bitter old women weren’t trying. But people really pitied her in those days.

It may not be fair, and it may not be right; but young and beautiful widows are easier to pity; and Idia was young and beautiful in those days. She continued to receive condolence visits, months and months after her bereavement. Of course, one person was paying most of the visits: an absent-minded theatre nurse who often went home from work still wearing his surgical mask. Idia herself didn’t like the embarrassing visits, which she finally ended by marrying the nurse.

That marriage caused quite a few gray-speckled eyebrows to rise slowly in Ikerre-Oti. The village is that sort of place. People carefully counted the days between the dying of Husband One and the marrying of Husband Two, getting only twenty-two months, two weeks and three days. That simple arithmetic caused a number of respectable Ikerre eyes to roll slowly in their sockets. It was not a very bad thing; and yet, it was not a very good thing, either.

•••

Had she taken advice from Ikerre’s old women, she would have discreetly entertained her condolence visitor another year, at least, before accepting his presumptuous ring. Yet, she was a beautiful, thirty-three-year-old widow - in those days - and it was hard for any gossip to stick to her. So she married the nurse and the Ikerre Heaven did not fall. Four years passed, and if there was any whispering at all (and to tell the truth, Ikerre-Oti was that sort of place) it was how two husbands and seven years of marriage had produced neither pregnancy nor child.

Then Husband Two died.

Once someone catches the eye of Ill-Luck the big problem is how to escape his future attentions. See her burnt-out kitchen for instance. People have been buying second-hand bits from Ekun for years and years without problems; but only last week Ma'Rebecca buys a second-hand electric kettle that burns her kitchen down. Anyway, the theatre nurse caught jaundice and died.

This time, the struggle to keep Idia from jumping into the well continued for seven days and nights. Serpents and scorpions! That widow cried! – And only an Ikerre indigene could have understood why her grief was deep like a well: she had buried two husbands, therefore a third one could never come from Ikerre-Oti; never mind that she was still beautiful and in her thirties. It was one of those silly superstitions. Catechist had talked and talked; Reverend had preached and preached, but it is easier to pluck all the hairs from the hairy chests of the Ikerre male than to pluck that fear from his heart. Even bachelors who dated three-time divorcees without qualms began to stutter in the presence of a twice-widowed.

And she was only thirty-seven. People really pitied her in those days.

Once again, Idia found herself receiving condolence visitors. This time though, within two weeks her visitors were very thin on the ground. Then the news broke, like the ripe seedpod of a flame-of-the-forest tree: Idia was pregnant! It was the sort of gossip that propped mouths open. Think about it: that the absent-minded nurse could have planted such a valuable seed in the very nick of time! Of course it would be hard, raising a child as a confirmed widow; but this was Ikerre-Oti. It was a hundred and one times better than being a childless, twice-over widow. Plus, it would bring the ultimate crown of Ikerre-womanhood: the replacement of her given name with a wombname. Idia would be Mama-somebody!

Four weeks passed, the burial rites ended, and she packed her things to leave for Lagos. Veterans of the Ikerre Health Centre nodded wisely: this child was too precious to trust to our hit-and-miss Health Centre, one of whose midwives had sneezed during my son’s circumcision and castrated him. So she packed her bags and left Ikerre-Oti.

April and May passed. A letter came for our chief, another came for the nurse’s cousin: things were hard but God was good. She had found a job and a good doctor to care for The Pregnancy. June, July and August passed. Three telegrams came, one after the other: she was bleeding! she was rushed to hospital! - and, praise God, The Pregnancy was fine. Ikerre's churches began to pray for Idia’s pregnancy along with Sunday collections. September and October passed. She wrote a letter to the nurse’s mother: the doctor thought it would be a girl, could she send a name? The mother wrote back: Rebecca. Then, November’s telegram arrived: Rebecca was born. It was like the day Nigeria won the World Cup. Ikerre-Oti cheered like lunatics on an asylum’s open day.

Drivers honked their horns on the streets.

Then four more years came and went and all she sent were photographs.

Ikerre’s bitter old women didn’t need that much time. Four years in a row? What kind of job had she found in Lagos that gave no annual vacations? Was Rebecca hers alone? Didn’t the child have a grandmother? Shouldn’t the poor old woman carry her only grandchild before she went to meet her ancestors? Indeed - come to think of it - was there truly a Rebecca in the first place? Did The Pregnancy survive that June bleeding? Was ‘Rebecca’ anything more than pictures cut out of a magazine?

Lagos was four hundred kilometres from Ikerre-Oti, but an Ikerre rumour was a diabolical instrument of long-distance torture. Almost five years after her departure, Ma’Rebecca returned to Ikerre-Oti. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She was forty-two, but you could still tell that she once was beautiful. People got a measure of the hardship of Lagos’ city life just by looking at Ma’Rebecca’s face. ‘Haven’t you seen Ma’Rebecca?’ was how mothers used to douse their teenagers’ dreams to move to Lagos. Those were the days when Ikerre gossip really began to stick to Ma’Rebecca, because although Rebecca was a beautiful child, she was as dark as the nurse had been fair. And she did look small for a four-year old; who was to tell how old exactly the child was? And the dispatch with which Ma'Rebecca had fled the village following her husband's funeral... was that just the fear of the Health Centre, wasn’t it more likely that she wasn't pregnant after all? And that 'doctor' she had so gleefully announced by telegram, was it a doctor to deliver a baby, or one with whom to make an urgent one?

Much later, I wondered why the widow returned to Ikerre at all: if Lagos had kept her for five years, it could have kept her forever. Ikerre’s rumour mill had ground stronger women to dust. The sight of Rebecca ended some rumours, but it fuelled far more vicious ones, for as the young girl grew she failed to develop any resemblance to her late father.

Nonsense and tenpence! This world is a terrible place.

Three years passed before the CID traced Ma’Rebecca. That very day the police car arrived in Ikerre was made in Heaven for gossips. What sweeter words can a wolfer-of-meals hear than, ‘eat quickly, it’s time to go home’? The plain-clothes detective didn’t talk much. Had he come alone, he could have quietly taken away Ma’Rebecca and her child, leaving Ikerre-Oti with a big mystery on which they could have speculated till Kingdom Come. Unfortunately, he didn’t come alone. He came with an unhinged woman who fell on Ma'Rebecca with such single-minded fury that she did not care that she had lost the wrapper around her waist. She would have strangled Ma’Rebecca, half-naked as she was, but for the dozen or so villagers on hand. ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?’ They asked her, swathing her with her recovered garment, but she had only one question for Ma’Rebecca: ‘how can you claim to love a child, and steal her from her mother?’ The astounded villagers turned to Ma’Rebecca, waiting for her furious denunciation, but she meekly crept into the police car for the next phase of her life.

It was as tragic as that.

But not as simple. There was one thing no one could explain, no matter how many times her tale was retold: why she returned to Ikerre after her jail sentence was done? Returned to a village whose natives, with supercilious exactitude, had now reverted to calling her 'Idia'. Were there no more villages in Nigeria? Could she not have found one of those face-me-I-face-you rooms in Lagos, into which to crawl and hide her shame forever? Me, I couldn’t understand that one: how she could be homesick for a village, whose relentless expectations had ruined her.

Maybe Rebecca was trying to explain it when she fled her real parents in Lagos to return to Ikerre-Oti, to the home of the child-thief. By then it was impossible to look at Ma’Rebecca and tell that she had once been beautiful (unless you spoke with her, or saw her speaking with Rebecca). Rebecca was twelve when she first returned to Ikerre, and Idia took her straight to the police station, from where she was returned, kicking and weeping, to her real parents. Back in Lagos, Rebecca was policed between home and school, but within six months she was back in Ikerre. Nobody could understand that either: that a girl who knew the facts, how a heartless thief had stolen her from her real parents, could be to that thief what Rebecca was to Ma’Rebecca. So they carried on like that, bearing off a screaming girl to Lagos three or four times a year until she turned sixteen when her parents gave up the battle and disowned her for good.

Ikerre-Oti folk are ordinary villagers. They will gape at everything they can’t understand; and our biggest mystery is the bond between Rebecca and her old woman. ‘Haven’t you seen Rebecca?’ is how Ikerre mothers chastise their rebellious teenagers, unconscious of the irony that a stolen daughter should be a model for real daughters to live up to. It is a complex bond, that thing between Rebecca and Idia, who the wide-eyed villagers have taken to calling 'Ma'Rebecca', once again.

*Ma'Rebecca was first published in a Slovene language edition in January 2007  by Arzenal, a magazine of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. It appears here in English for the first time.